Roundup: Energy-Aware Routing, Savvis, XO, Juniper

Here's a roundup of some of some of this week's headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

Energy-Aware Internet Routing. An energy reduction of as much as 40% could be seen by rerouting data to locations where electricity prices are lowest on a particular day. This was according to a study from MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Akamai. MIT PhD student Asfandyar Qureshi first outlined the idea of a smart routing algorithm in October 2008 and he then approached researchers at Akamai to obtain the real-world routing data needed to test the idea. "The researchers first analyzed 39 months of electricity price data collected for 29 major US cities. The team then devised a routing scheme to take advantage of daily and hourly fluctuations in electricity costs across the country". Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory staff scientist Jonathan Koomey said "the trick is to be able to control these systems well enough to create controls that are cheap enough to be able to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity available from different electricity prices, without effecting reliability or latency." The research paper, to be presented at SIGCOMM 2009 can be found here.

Tradebeam selects Savvis to support IT infrastructure. Savvis announced Monday an agreement to provide hosting services to TradeBeam, a software-as-a-service provider for global trade management (GTM). TradeBeam's solutions facilitate billions of dollars of global trade. TradeBeam Vice President of IT said "Savvis is an industry leader offering a global footprint of high performance SAS 70 certified data centers integrated with one of the world's largest Tier 1 networks".

XO Communications embarks on third nationwide network capacity upgrade. The XO inter-city transport network will more than double in capacity with the latest upgrade, to be completed later this year. XO Communications again chose Infinera products to deploy the ultra-long-haul network, this time using Infinera's ILS2 line and delivering 160 wavelengths on a single fiber. The 1.6 Terabits/second optical capacity will service carriers, service providers and enterprise customers as well as XO's Carrier Services network transport offerings. The current Infinera DTN system is the only DWDM system with 160 wavelengths in the C-band and is scalable to 8 Tb/s in the future.

Layer 2 data center network scaled to 100,000 nodes. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego have created software that they hope will lead to data centers logically functioning as a single network. The prototype, PortLand is currently running in the lab as a fault-tolerant, layer 2 data center network fabric capable of scaling to 100,000 nodes and beyond. "With PortLand, we came up with a set of algorithms and protocols that combine the best of layer 2 and layer 3 network fabrics", said Amin Vahdat, senior author on the paper to be presented at SIGCOMM and computer science professor at UC Sand Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering. A key innovation in PortLand is location discovery protocol, where switches automatically learn their location within the data center topology without any human intervention.

Juniper Networks grows in the enterprise switch market. Surpassing one million ports shipped, Juniper continues to make an impact in the enterprise ethernet switch market. Juniper announced Monday that its EX series Ethernet Switches posted four consecutive quarters of revenue growth through second quarter 2009 and have surpassed one million ports shipped. Revenue for the EX series grew 44 percent over the previous quarter and 312 percent over the same quarter last year. Partially fueling that growth was the June announcement that Juniper was planning an ultra-low latency network for global trading data centers with NYSE Euronext. Mike Banic, vice president of product marketing at Juniper said "based on the companies covered in the Dell'Oro report, over the past five quarters of revenue shipments, Juniper has grown its EX Series switch revenue faster than any enterprise Layer2/Layer 3 switch vendor entering the market in the previous decade."